Kerry Buckley What’s the simplest thing that could possibly go wrong?

Still no hot water. I’m getting used to it, to be honest – even attempting these cold showers that seem to be so trendy these days. Additional delay caused by a couple of days’ back-and-forth with the person who was recommended to do the plumbing, only to eventually discover that he’s a heating engineer and doesn’t really do that kind of stuff. He recommended someone who is a plumber, but who is yet to get back to my message. Obviously this could all have been accomplished much quicker with phone calls, but that’s only for dire emergencies.

I bought a mildly-damaged but working customer-returned dehumidifier from eBay, and have had it running continuously while trying to keep the kitchen as closed off as possible while still letting the cats get to the flap and their food. Unusually, it has the water tank on the top, fed via a pump that comes on when (I assume) a small internal tank is full. This means that by simply adding a length of aquarium air hose it sends the water straight into the sink so no need to keep emptying it. It’s keeping the kitchen at around 35% humidity (and warm), so hopefully the damp’s slowly being drawn out of the floor.

Wednesday was FRR’s Run Bike Run event, a club social in Felixstowe that involves running about 1.5 miles, riding 6, then running another 2.5 (with the catch that there’s a cutoff time, and the “winner” is the last person to start that gets in in time). Then we all sat around for a bit eating sine excellent veggie chilli courtesy of Nicola and Sally, and I drank the beers I’d brought with me. As usual, I made life difficult for myself by cycling there and back from Ipswich, so once you add in my commute to work I ended up riding nearly 40 miles by the end of the day.

With the long string of Friday races finally having come to an end, and in fact nothing really happening until September, I didn’t really have an excuse to take it easy at parkrun this week. The plan was to just go a bit quicker though, as we’re still only five weeks into the new Christchurch Park event, so I can keep getting course PBs for a while. Unfortunately I’d put the wrong numbers into my spreadsheet, and convinced myself I needed to beat an average pace of 7:54/mile. I succeeded, but it felt tougher than it seemed like it should, given that I’d basically jogged round the previous four times. It turned out I’d actually gone about 2½ minutes quicker. Oops.

On Sunday I went for a long slow run round a loop out to the imaginary local village of Culpho with Holly, then as it stayed dry I finally took my new bike out for a quick spin. Surprisingly to no-one, it turns out that a carbon bike with fancy gears is significantly quicker than the fixed gear gravel bike that I’ve been pretty much exclusively using for years! I rode about 8 miles, mostly on country lanes, in half an hour without incident.

According to the scramble/timer app on my phone, I’ve now solved my puzzle cube (not technically a Rubik’s Cube because that’s a trademark) over 5,000 times. I’m sure this is perfectly fine and normal. I’ve also discovered that I struggle to solve anything other than a speed cube (I got a comically tiny one for a couple of quid from AliExpress, and can’t do it at all), because I rely on muscle memory and my hands completely fail to have any idea what to do if they get slowed down.

Still no hot water. The “trace and access” people came round on Friday, and confirmed that it’s leaking from below where the pipe comes up out of the floor under the sink (every time I turn the water back on the leak gets stronger!). Also as suspected, the fix (not covered by insurance) will be to get a plumber to run a new pipe and cap off the one that goes under the concrete. Drying everything out fully and reinstating it would be covered by insurance, but would involve ripping up the floor tiles and removing half the kitchen units and worktop. I can’t face the disruption of going through all that, so I’m going to opt for just running a dehumidifier for a while then getting the plaster and skirting boards sorted later.

I still haven’t ridden my new bike yet either – my new shoes and road cleats arrived on Friday, just in time for the wet weather to set in.

Tuesday’s club session involved lots of short flat-out sprint efforts (probably good as I generally don’t do enough anaerobic training). Strava decided to troll me with this summary afterwards:

I didn’t cycle there this week, which was a relief because of both the wind and the state of my legs afterwards.

We ran another unconference at work on Wednesday, with some interesting conversations around stuff like monoliths vs microservices and “how much testing is too much?” (probably more than you’re doing).

A second consecutive training night on Wednesday, with the monthly track session returning after a hiatus during Friday 5 season. It was “broken kilometres”, with sets of 1×400m, 2×200m and 4×100m efforts, with 30s static recovery between each effort. During the final all-out 100m effort I just about managed, for a few seconds, to reach Kipchoge’s average marathon pace!

Last Friday race for a while, with the Twilight 10k. It’s not the greatest of courses (several 180° turns round cones), but it’s nice to race through the town centre. A record turnout this year too, with over 1300 finishers (a bit big for my taste). I guess that makes my 211th place reasonably respectable, even if I continue to get slower year by year!

I made the mistake of watching Fall, as it was on iPlayer. It does a reasonable job of building tension, but hardly anything that happens makes any sense. I can’t decide whether they just didn’t bother talking to anyone with a basic knowledge of how climbing equipment (or physics) works, or whether they knew it was nonsense but felt that injecting any degree of realism would spoil the plot in some way.

Speaking of iPlayer, I’ve also started watching the US version of Ghosts. So far it looks as though it might live up to the original, which is no mean feat.

I remembered something else that happened, then immediately forgot again. Clearly getting old.

I forgot to mention last week that just before I left Ekiden on Sunday I bit into one of my home-made ginger nuts, and felt a crown detach itself from one of my teeth (if I remember correctly, it’s the one from about 20 years ago). I got an appointment with the dentist on Tuesday, and he poked around for a few seconds before (unsurprisingly, after being told at my last checkup that both crowns had decay underneath them) telling me that it wasn’t really salvageable. The options were basically some kind of complicated procedure involve cutting down into the gum that might not work anyway, extracting it, or leaving it for now and extracting it if and when it became an issue. I went for the third option. That cost me £30, which is a pretty nice hourly rate if you can get it.

For some reason I kept getting adverts on Instagram for some fancy hydroponic herb garden thing. I didn’t buy one, but did order something similar, less fancy-looking and about a tenth of the price from AliExpress. I found some out-of-date seeds, and planted basil, coriander, a couple of types of chilli and tomato. Most of them have germinated, so fingers crossed. The main one I’m hoping works is the basil, because whenever I buy it from the supermarket (either cut or as a plant) it generally lasts about a day before going weird and inedible. For some reason while I had the kitchen door open in the heat a grasshopper decided to take up residence under the light.

On Friday I poured a drink of water and was shocked at how warm it was. I initially thought it was just from not running the tap enough, but I turned the tap on again, and for the first few seconds it was definitely *way* hotter than it had any right to be. I tried the hot tap, and it was instantly at full temperature, which isn’t right as I have a combi boiler and it takes a while to fire up on demand. I went to check the boiler, and sure enough, it was running even with the tap off. Then I realised that an area of the kitchen floor was unnaturally warm under my feet.

I’m assuming that the hot water pipe has sprung a leak, and it’s probably been slowly leaking for a while, until today the flow reached a high enough rate to trigger the boiler. This would also explain why the walls and skirting board recently started mysteriously showing signs of damp. The problem is that the pipes are in concrete, under travertine tiles.

For now I’ve turned off the boiler and the inlet feed (and briefly turning it back on for long enough to shower), and am waiting for the insurance people to get back to me, presumably on Monday.

Last time I broke a tooth and had to turn a water supply off in the same week was in mid March 2020, so if these things really do come in threes then we’re all in trouble

Friday evening was the Brantham 5 mile “fun run” (kind of an unofficial extra Friday 5). With the prospect of traffic nightmares from a combination of the Orwell Bridge roadworks and Ed Sheeran playing at Portman Road, I was talked into cycling there (13 miles or so each way). Considering that, the race didn’t go too badly, although the heat made the fairly hilly course even harder than usual.

With all this cycling I’d been thinking of getting a road bike as an alternative to my fixed-gear gravel bike. I was watching a few second hand ones on eBay, and put in a bid for one after getting a “finishing soon” notification while sitting outside the pub after Ekiden. Fortunately when it arrived everything seems to be in excellent condition, and it’s a pretty high spec for what I paid for it. I’m yet to ride it, because I wasn’t organised enough to sort myself out with road shoes before it turned up.

On Sunday Holly and I finally managed to run to Felixstowe, after last year’s nettle fiasco. We took a road route this time, to avoid a repeat of that trauma, and by the time we got there we both had tired, but unstung legs. The plan was to stop for chips, ice cream and/or beer before getting the train back, but Holly had to rush back for a parcel delivery so we only had time for a quick paddle and a rushed pint in the Grosvenor on the walk back up to the station. We even found an outlying hare (I think there are two in Felixstowe, but not sure where the other is).

And yes, we accidentally wore matching vests again.

When I got home I was sitting in the kitchen, and looked up to see a sparrow hawk (I think) sitting on the pile of logs in the back garden. It flew off before I could get a photo though.

Third week in a row that I’ve been talked into cycling to Felixstowe (about ten miles each way) for training night on Tuesday. Not sure whether it adds to or detracts from the running effort!

Another month must have passed, because it was time for ex-colleagues Fat Cat meet-up again. Rupert, Mel and Tony this time, and it was warm enough to sit outside in a T-shirt (although only just, by the time we left).

The final Friday 5 of the series this week, at Great Bentley. I ended up 5th in my age category (out of 18 who’d completed at least four races out of six – the best four score), which I guess isn’t bad. Well done to club-mates Steve, who took the gold in my category with a perfect set of age group first places, and Holly, who finished fourth in hers, missing out on the podium by a single point.

The local parkrun was off this week because of an event in the park, so a few of us cycled out to Alton Water to do that one instead (and still somehow managed to end up in the Ipswich ’Spoons for breakfast!).

We cycled out in the same direction again on Sunday, for the Ekiden Relay. I had the opening 7.2k leg for FRR (it’s an odd distance because 7.2+5+10+5+10+5=42.2, or a marathon), and managed a not-too-shabby 30:44. The “supervet” (50+) team I was in managed to come third in that category, although I’m not claiming much credit for that. Our vets (40+) beat us again. Then I ran a 5k leg for the Coffee Runners’ social team, which went a bit wrong when I saw the previous runner go past and everyone told me he still had a lap to go, but it turns out that wasn’t the case. When when I wasn’t there for the changeover they called out on the PA, but he decided to start another lap rather than waiting and I had to intercept him partway round, meaning I only did about 2.3 miles.

The weather held for most of the day, but like last year there was a downpour late on. We managed to time our ride home to avoid getting too soaked this time though. Well I say home, obviously it was actually to the Cricketers first.

Over a week late this week (last week?). Oops.

A long-overdue week off work, with nothing planned other than some balance of relaxation and tackling a small fraction of the ever-present list of jobs round the house. The first two of those were to chop up another two brown bins’ worth of garden waste ready for when they collected them on Wednesday, and cut my front hedge, which was starting to encroach on the pavement. Fortunately I did them in the opposite order, meaning that the hedge clippings filled the bins, providing the perfect excuse to shirk the other task. I also managed to clean the bathroom and a few other bits and bobs, and also do the chopping-up and bin-filling once the bins had been emptied.

On Thursday I managed to join a Run for Coffee for the first time in a while, then cycled out to the Red Lion at Martlesham for a colleague’s leaving do. The food was OK, but I wasn’t that impressed when I went to the bar to try to get a second pint, the pumps pretty much went off one by one, and someone was despatched to the cellar to “check the gas”. After waiting a while, I asked them to bring it over if they finally got things working again, but it never arrived, and no-one ever checked whether I might want something else instead.

Later that day I looked up to see not one but two foxes watching me. They looked quite young, so I guess there’s a family of them somewhere nearby.

Somehow I managed to get Thursday’s Wordle in two, despite not getting a single letter in my first guess.

Wordle 1,469 2/6*
?????
?????

Stowmarket Friday 5 this week, then Christchurch Park parkrun #2 (and a Wetherspoons breakfast for the second consecutive week), and the Newmarket 10k on Sunday. The latter was warm again, and no sausages as prizes this year. We stopped for some lunch at the Willow Tree in Stowmarket, and thanks to the late arrival of Dave and Gripper, who’d cycled to Newmarket for the race, ended up having four pints. It would almost have been rude not to, with Jaipur going for £2.29 a pint. Then barely time for a shower before heading over to Rob and Jo’s for a barbecue.